10 Creepy Encounters That Cant Be Explained

Have you had an experience that you just can’t explain? Something creepy that happened, leaving a feeling you’ll remember years afterward? These 10 Quora users explained the creepiest things that have ever happened to them.

Read through and feel free to share your own creepy experiences in the comments below.

1/10

Last year during my senior year of college I lived with a couple of roommates in a house in the oldest section of the town. Our land lord told us that the house had always been in the family since it was built in the 1860s. Aside from that, we didn’t really know much about the history of it. It was a creaky and rickety old house, with an especially creepy basement, that featured laundry machines and an unused coal room.

Some strange things happened in that house in the fall. We began to have a lot of electrical issues, the power would randomly go out for a few minutes before switching back on by itself. The oddest thing about these power outages was that they only seemed to happen at night, I cant recall a single time the power shut off during the day. My roommates and I simply associated the issues with the age of the house.

One evening while I was doing my laundry and noticed something odd, the door to the coal room was shut. We normally had it propped open, so I went to inspect it and found that it was locked. I called my roommates down and we determined it was locked from the inside. They all laughed it off, but I felt rather unsettled.

About a week later, I was home alone watching House of Cards in my room. My roommates were all at the library together, I declined to join since I didn’t have much work to do. Suddenly, the TV flickered and the power went out. The house went silent. I turned my phone’s flashlight on and prepared to go into the basement in order to flip the breakers. As I closed near the basement door, I distinctly heard the sound of footsteps coming up creaky stairs. Ill never forget the sound, menacing and methodical…

CLUNkkk… CLUNkkk… CLUNkkk…

I got the HELL out of there. I ran to my car and raced out of there to my girlfriend’s house for the night.

The next day I told my roommates about what had happened. They didn’t seem to believe me, but agreed to come check out the basement with me. When we made it down the stairs, we made an extremely unsettling discovery…

2/10

This story is from when I was about 16, and living in Colorado. There is a lot of wilderness close to where I grew up, and for bored teenagers there is plenty of space to explore. My boyfriend and I were close friends with another couple, Sarah, who was my best friend & John. On the weekends we would go on adventures to random places. John was very interested in the supernatural, and loved to tell us stories of the things he had experienced. Some were wild, some creepy, and some were downright scary.

Near my boyfriend’s house was a lovely stream in the woods, which the locals had deemed ‘haunted’ since there was a rumor of a witches coven that regularly practiced there. During the day it was beautiful, with a rope swing and plenty of grass for lounging. On hot summer days we would all spend hours hanging out here, drinking beer and telling stories. My boyfriend told us the story of the things the witches had done, like human sacrifice and satanistic rituals, and John became obsessed. He wanted to see what was going on in this place for himself! Of course, my boyfriend was interested as well, as he grew up with these stories and wanted proof. Sarah and I were more cautious, but being 16 we would go if our boyfriends were so passionate about it. So it was decided that on the next full moon we would all go on a midnight adventure to ‘The Witch’s Place’.

The next full moon came, and I remember it very clearly. We didn’t need sweaters or flashlights we had brought since it was so warm and bright, but the boys kept their flashlights just in case. Everything seemed so different at night. The 20 minute walk to the spot by the stream seemed much longer. Once we arrived I got a strange feeling. It was ominous, like someone or something didn’t want us there. John and my boyfriend wanted to sit and talk – but I couldn’t sit still.

I had a feeling in my gut that I shouldn’t be there, and I wanted to get the hell out. I started to hear things like rustling of the trees and bushes that sounded like people running. They seemed to be all around us. John and my boyfriend tried to pass it off as the wind, but it was a balmy summer night with almost no breeze. These noises were from something damnit, and the feeling in my gut only grew when hearing them.

Finally to try and calm me, John brought out his flashlight. He shined it all around us and I didn’t see anything in particular. I felt slightly better. He then began shining it on the opposite side of the stream, and that’s when I saw it.

Only for a brief second when the light passed over it, but it filled my entire body with an overwhelming sense of dread. It looked like a person, naked and wrinkled, with extremely wiry and matted hair. And it was looking right at me. The eyes were horrible and full of hate. They were almost glowing, and saying “Get out”!

I froze, and for about 5 seconds could not speak. When I regained my composure, I told everyone that we needed to leave NOW.

Everyone was finally on the same page somehow. We hauled our asses out of there, and I know I made the 20 minute walk in about 5 minutes since I was running as fast as I could. We all piled into my boyfriend’s car and got the hell out of there. I think we left a dust cloud on our exit. I felt the presence all the way to the car, and it didn’t go away until we got on the road to leave.

3/10

It was during the first year of B.Tech. I was a hosteler. Our hostel was more like an apartment; each room like a single BHK flat. The hall has two beds and an attached kitchen and a balcony and the bedroom has two beds and an attached bathroom.

My roommate and I were occupants of the bedroom. When you enter the bedroom, to your left is the bathroom, and on your right, on either side of the room is a bed with two study tables in between. My bed was the one on the left and behind the bed was a window. We had a long curtain put up there and absolutely no light entered through it during the night.

That night, as usual, we stayed up late talking and went to bed at around 1 AM. My roommate switched off the lights and we laid on our beds.

Back then, I had the Sony Xperia Mini smartphone which had a camera button on its right. The thing with the camera button was that when you press it once, the flash appears and you have to press it again to click a picture.

I was bored so I held my name keychain infront of my phone and tried clicking a picture but as it was pitch dark and I had no idea where I was aiming, all I managed to click was the cupboard infront of my bed. The flash light was strong.

I tried a second time and this time, when I clicked the button once and the flash appeared, my heart stopped when I saw what I saw.

There, in front of the bathroom walking towards the door of the bedroom with her head down, was a young girl wearing a short kurta and had short hair.

I barely managed to scream. My voice came out like a terrified whisper and I asked my roommate to switch on the lights. The moment she did, I screamed out saying I saw someone near the bathroom.

What she said made my heart stop again.

“I saw it too!”, she screamed. I immediately asked her to describe what she saw and bloody hell! She gave me the exact description of the girl I saw!

My heart was beating so fast I could hear it! We were terrified! The first thing I did was call dad. He stays abroad and he was so worried about my late night call that he immediately called me back. I told him what had happened and he kept trying to convince me saying it must have been some reflection from the window and stuff. I wasn’t convinced. I saw what I saw. It was a jinn.

He asked us to go to another friend’s room. We woke our friends up and they all came to our room. All this while, I was holding my Qura’an tight, close to my heart, and repeating all the prayers I knew over and over again. We slept in another room for the night.

The news spread like fire throughout college and also different versions of it.

Our friends, to this day, mock us about it. We laugh along with them but we know, in our hearts, that what we saw wasn’t our imagination.

4/10

My computer took a dump and I lost my original, brilliantly written answer to this question. I can only assume that whatever force in the universe caused this creepy event to occur initially is trying to hide its existence from the world…

When I was about eighteen, I got a telephone call from a strange man. The phone in my room rang (for you kids reading now, telephones used to actually be attached to walls; you didn’t carry them around with you. I was one of the privileged few kids my age who not only had hid own phone, but also his own number – listed in the phone book and everything!) and I went in and answered it. He asked, “Is this Courtney Ballard?” and I acknowledged that it was. He told me his name in a tone that implied that he expected me to know who he was. I was clueless.

He asked me again if I was me, and I had no choice but to again say that yes, I was in fact me. He then said, “I’m calling to make sure you’re OK. You looked pretty shook up yesterday.”

At this point I had to tell him that I had no idea what he was talking about. I had been fine the day before.

He pressed on: “Yesterday? When you wrecked your car?”

“Sir… I… think you might have the wrong number.”

“This is Courtney Ballard, right?”

“Yes sir, my name is Courtney Ballard”

“And you live in (the name of the tiny town I lived in)?

“Yes sir, that’s me, but I didn’t wreck my car yesterday…”

Over the course of a very confusing and uncomfortable fifteen minutes, he proceeded to tell me about ‘our meeting’ the day before: I had come around the corner in front of his house too fast, lost control, and hit a large oak tree in his front yard. I had been shaken up, but the car was drive-able and I’d refused all offers of help. He’d managed to get me to reveal my name before I left, and I’d told him that I was on my home to that small town, but nothing else.

He described me – my size, my shape, my hair length and color. He described my car – not the make and model, but the size, shape, and color.

At first I thought it was a put-on, that a friend was pranking me, but as the conversation progressed, the man’s concern was convincing. He had been so worried about me that he’d looked me up and called to make sure I was Ok.

By the end of the conversation I managed to convince him that I was Ok, that I really didn’t know anything about it. He had given me his name and address over the course of the call, and he invited me to stop by sometime.

When I hung up the phone, I was actually curious; I went outside and looked at my car. No damage – everything was just as I remembered it. I shook my head and walked back inside.

A few days later I was driving home and this phone call was echoing around the back of my mind. I remembered the man’s name, and what part of town he lived in. It wasn’t far off of my route home, so I looked him up in the phone book, got his address, and headed that way. As I came around a sweeping bend in the road I saw a house like the one he had described. In the front yard was a large oak, and there were marks in the grass where a car has recently left the road, leading straight for the tree.

5/10

When I was in kindergarten and elementary school, I was friends with a girl, let’s call her Jennie because I feel uncomfortable writing her real name in public. She came over to my house all the time and up until now, my Mom would still recall memories of her with fondness. She said that she never knew anyone as honest as Jennie. When my parents asked her what I had been doing in class, Jennie would tell them everything. EVERYTHING. Whether I got a bad grade, fell asleep in class and upset a teacher or crushed on a boy.

In 5th grade, on the last day of school, a group of students in our class, including Jennie, decided to skip school to go to the beach. I was being grounded so I couldn’t join. During that trip, two of the kids drowned and several of them were admitted into psychiatrist ward. Jennie was one of those who died. I don’t really know what happened, no adult ever gave me any detail. My parents even forbid me to go by Jennie’s house after that because whenever Jennie’s mom saw me, she would call me in and say: “If Jennie was still alive nowadays, she would be going to school like you.” Then she would try to hug me and call me Jennie.

About a year later, when I had just finished 6th grade, I had a dream in which Jennie and I were playing. Jennie was braiding my hair the way she always did and told me that she was happy because I would be visiting her soon. I woke up feeling a bit spooked but didn’t think much of it. Then at breakfast, my parents told me that they had a surprise for me: they were taking me to the beach. On our way, my Mom made us stop at an unpopular beach which now had the sign “Danger” and told me: “That’s where your friend Jennie died.” I thought of the dream and started crying. I had never dreamt about Jennie before, or maybe I had but I never remembered it until that night. I never dreamt about her again.

From that point on, I can never think of that dream without getting goosebumps all over.

6/10

One night I was up nursing my youngest baby. We kept him in an office attached to our bedroom to keep him near. The office had floor to ceiling mirrored sliding doors for a closet on one wall. While nursing, in the dark, I always fell asleep in a twilight-type sleep.

I would feel a weird draft type feeling on the back of my neck. I would open my eyes and I would see a man standing behind me (in the mirror); I’d blink and open my eyes again and he was gone. I quite literally thought I was seeing things. Freaked me out so badly I took the baby into bed with me.

Night after night would go by and eventually I would bring the baby back to his bed. Though, I kept seeing the man when slightly waking up. Clear as day I would see this man. Each time, getting more of a glimpse of him. He wasn’t creepy or menacing – just creepy that I kept seeing this image. While I ran away from him the first time, for some reason, I didn’t freak out as much each time after.

The man, dark-skinned, big wide sun-cowboyish hat, well dressed in a suit (not modern-day style though), with a tie. Medium build, average height. I couldn’t quite make out his face because of the hat. My intrigue got the best of me and I had to see his face. But each time was the same: I’d barely open my eyes and see him only to blink once and he’d be gone. But I could “feel” a presence. Super bizarre.

My father-in-law and I spoke about it. He had built the house, so I knew no one had died in it. It had to be my imagination. It had to be.

To my surprise, my father in law told me “Well, maybe someone died in this plot of land – you don’t know what happened here before they built out this area”. GEEZ, thanks Papa. :/

Some weeks later, my cousin posted a photo of my great-great-great Grandfather (an American Indian, who was some big-shot with the tribe). I felt like crying. It was him. The picture of the man, my ancestor who I’d never seen before… that was the man I kept seeing at night. It was plain as day. Same exact outfit. Same face (but in my vision, he had a small beard).

I’ve never seen him since. We had moved… and I’ve never seen him again. I’m not a believer in ghosts – but this creepy occurrence made me kind of believe in them. Kind of.

I still wonder why, if it was my ancestor, why me (out of his hundreds of descendants)? Why this house? Why watch me with this child? Super odd. Super creepy.

The weirdest thing of it all? I feel like I know him. And I’ve never so much as heard a story about him.

7/10

This might not be as creepy as the other stories I’ve read in the answers, but it actually happened and it was really odd, at least to me and my mom.

I usually go to sleep with the TV on and no sound, and that night was not an exception.

I had gone to bed early, and woke up in the middle of the night, agitated, uneasy. There was SO MUCH noise, almost unbearable. When I looked up, there was the TV on as I had left it, but there was this pale girl, with red eyes, and she was screaming, and it seemed as she was trying to get out of my TV set.

Before I even had the chance to turn the TV off (I couldn’t even move anyway), my mom had already come quickly to see what was up with that horrible noise. She immediately tried to turn the TV off from the remote, with no success! I had been able to recover my body in that short period so I stood up and tried to turn it off directly, but it was useless too.

8/10

My favorite family member went on vacation and ended up going missing. I was devastated, and never really ever accepted it. I kept finding reasons to believe for YEARS (even a little bit still) he would come home. When everyone was talked about how great of a person he was, I would immediately reject it and say “No no no, he’s coming home.”

I never really talked about my cousin to anyone. I didn’t like bringing it up, or anything around the time. Even though I was clingy to the point I had pictures of him in my locker at school, in my folders, in my room, etc. I really wouldn’t bring him up unless asked when I got older. Different story when I was between 6-10, all I did was talk about him.

When I was 16 my close grandmother had died. I didn’t talk about her much because there was a lot of family drama surrounding her. It was just hard to mention. Not many people knew she died, and I invited only a select few closest to me to a memorial dinner.

One day I was walking around, and a man caught up with me while we walked. He just talked and seemed to pick at me a little bit. Finally he said “Hey, did you have anyone die recently? Someone’s trying to talk to you.” I stopped and I looked confused, I didn’t want to eat into him so I just said “Explain.” He described an old woman, called her by her name and described how she was as a person. He was spot on. I responded “I love you too grandma.” and kept walking, thoroughly creeped out. He followed up to me again “Hey.. Wait.. There’s at least one last important one. It’s a young man.”

I stopped cold in my tracks. I knew exactly who he meant. I didn’t turn around because I didn’t want to face him, as if he was my fear. He described how the boy died and told me he and my cousin wanted to give me peace. I didn’t turn around or say anything. I just kinda stood there. I didn’t hear or feel the man walk away (as apposed to feeling/hearing him walk up to me), but I finally turned around and he just wasn’t there. No trace of him walking away whatsoever.

That was the day I accepted a death that burdened me for a bit over a decade.

9/10

It was in college while I was writing letters for my closest high school friends one night. Email and texts weren’t “in” back then. While writing a letter for one of those friends, I felt a creepy chill that brought shivers down my spine as if the wind blew but it wasn’t a windy nor rainy day back then. It was followed by the smell of candle burning and some sort of floral perfume.

The next day, I found out that that classmate in mind died the night before. I don’t believe in ghosts but many people say it was her and she dropped by our house the night she died to say goodbye.

10/10

I ran into an old friend this weekend, and he reminded me of one that be personally witnessed.

He and I rode motorcycles together. We were headed home late one night (we lived in the same place) and were riding down a hill on the edge of downtown.

We saw a couple fighting in a parking lot. He got in his car, an enormous old Buick, and started to drive away, leaving her standing staring after him.

He pulled to the edge of the parking lot, and stopped as if he’d seen us and was waiting for us to go by. Then, right before I got to him, he pulled out.

There was nothing I could do.

With no time to swerve or even hit the brakes, I saw the fender of that old land yacht roll into my path. I heard my friend’s horn, and my thumb must have found its way to my own horn button because my air horns were blaring. The sound I remember the most though, was the woman who’d been left behind in the parking lot screaming.

I’ve never heard, before or since, such a scream. Shrill. Piercing. It was a blood curdling shriek that echoed off of the buildings and haunted my dreams for months afterward. I can still hear it if I close my eyes.

Then, it was over. The echoes of the scream died away and I was still riding. I looked in my mirror, and there was no car. No sign of one. The only vehicle behind me was my friend’s Honda. We didn’t stop until we got home, and once home we retired for the night without a word.

The next morning I awoke feeling as though I’d been beaten. Every inch of my body was sore. My hair hurt. When I saw my friend, he looked as though he’d seen a ghost, but still neither of us said anything. It was a few days later when he said, “Can – uh, can I ask you a weird question? Did… Did you… Ride… Through that car??”

There was no way for me to have missed that car. There was no time to react. He – and, I assume, the woman in the parking lot – saw me hit the car. But somehow I didn’t.

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